Hendrik Zwietasch / Württemberg State Museum
The Adorer, a 38,000-year-old representation of a lion-human hybrid, is a small ivory plaque with an anthropomorphic figure and multiple sequences of carvings and dots.
Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a complete writing system.
Complete and systematic writing, Mesopotamian cuneiform, is considered to have emerged around 3200 BC, around 5,200 years ago. It was used by the Sumerians mainly toaccounting ins: record crops, livestock, commercial transactions.
However, according to a new study by mysterious engraved signs in figurines and other artifacts found in Germany, the Stone Age humans40,000 years ago, they used a rudimentary form of writingcomparable in complexity to the most primitive stages of the world’s first writing system.
If confirmed, this finding, which was presented in a published this Monday in PNAS, the emergence of a proto-writing system in more than 30,000 years, note a.
Ancient humans have always made deliberate marks on objects, but some of the earliest groups of A wise man arriving in Europe around 45,000 years ago went further.
Many of the artifacts they produced, such as pendants, tools and figurines, were engraved with sequences of graphic symbolssuch as lines, crosses and dots. These groups also painted symbols on cave wallsalong with depictions of animals, and the meaning of these symbols has been the subject of controversy.
O use of symbol sequences is particularly notable.
“Having this recurrent, very systematic use of brands that are clearly distinct from each other, applied in sequences, this is something completely different“, says the archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewiczresearcher at the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, Germany, and corresponding author of the article.
The big question is: What did these symbols mean?if they meant anything? Without a Rosetta Stonethe slab that made it possible to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, is almost impossible to knowbut it is possible to obtain fundamental clues by analyzing how these signals were used.
To investigate this question, Dutkiewicz and linguist Christian Bentz, from the University of Saarland, in Saarbrücken, Germany, analyzed the sequences of signs engraved on the remarkable set of artifacts discovered in caves in the Swabian Juria region, in southwestern Germany.
These artifacts will have been produced between 43,000 and 34,000 years ago by some of the first groups of H. sapiens arriving in Europe, at a time known as Aurignacense.
Among these objects, which include flutes, animal sculptures such as mammoths and figurines of animal-human hybrids, 260 pieces were engraved more than 3000 times with 22 different symbols.
The most common is a V-shaped notchfollowed by lines, crosses and dots; other symbols, such as Y-shaped and star signs, appear less frequently.
The researchers used computational models to analyze the complexity and information density of the sequences. They compared the patterns with those of the oldest known form of proto-writing, the proto-cuneiformfound on clay tablets manufactured in Mesopotamia around 3500 to 3350 BC, as well as contemporary writing.
The goal was to understand what these Stone Age sign systems had in common with later systems used to record information.
“Does it make sense to analyze the sequencesbecause information is not only encoded in the number of different signals available, but… in the way these signals are combined“, explains Bentz. The English alphabet, for example, has only 26 letters, but by combining them into patterns can encode all the sounds of spoken language.
The analysis revealed that Aurignac sign sequences are clearly distinguished from contemporary writing.
But, to the surprise of investigatorsthe statistical properties of 40,000-year-old signal sequences are comparable to those of the first tablets of proto-cuneiform. “The characteristics are very, very similar,” says Bentz.
This suggests that the first H. sapiens in Europe, who were hunter-gatherers, had created a system of symbols to record your thoughts. What satisfies one of the definitions of writing: a system that allows human communication through a visible brand convention.
Hildegard Jensen / University of Tübingen
This gigantic figurine from the Vogelherd cave in Germany, 40,000 years old, features multiple sequences of crosses and dots on its surface
“What this study demonstrates is that the way brands are used on Aurignac pieces presents a type of configuration that corresponds closely to proto-cuneiform”, says the paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger. “They are showing that there is repetition of patterns and organization.”
Still, this doesn’t mean that the information recorded in both systems had the same meaning.
It is known that cuneiform emerged as a accounting system to recordfor example, crop quantitiesbut what about the meanings of Stone Age “writing”? There are indications that some of the marks used on Aurignac objects may have constituted a kind of calendar.
For example, the so-called Adoringa representation of a lion-human hybrid carved from a plaque of mammoth ivory, it is decorated with dots and carvings in rows of 13 or 12which could be “calendar observations“, says Dutkiewicz. “It makes sense that these people would want control the time“.
The authors also examined whether different signs were used in different types of objects, having found striking usage patterns.
Crosses, despite being one of the most common signs, never appear in the objects they represent human beingsbut they are common in those with engravings of animals, especially horses and mammoths, as well as on tools. Already the dots never appear on tools.
“Whatever this means, we don’t know“, admits Dutkiewicz. “But it is a consistent pattern that tells us that there was a deliberate choice of the signs applied to the supports”.
Furthermore, these choices remained stable over the 10,000 years during which the objects were produced, which suggests that conventions were passed down from generation to generation. “It’s something that has lasted for millennia,” he says.
“They were definitely marks made in specific locationss for specific reasons,” says von Petzinger. “Even if we don’t know what they meant, we know that they had meaning for those who made them“.
The results of the study thus suggest that, although the first complete writing system, cuneiform, emerged around 3,200 BC, its roots could date back to 40,000 years ago.
